by Simon Hawke
“You’re not eating, Martingale,” said Drakov in English, so that they could converse in privacy.
“Did you expect me to have an appetite?” said Phoenix.
“After all we have been through together, I certainly did not expect you to be squeamish. Or sentimentally moralistic. I should have had you killed as well, but that would have left a lot of unanswered questions. Our meeting like this only serves to prove what I told you once before, that our destinies are linked. I gave you a position of power and responsibility. You betrayed me. I would like to hear your reasons. What did the Time Commandos have to offer you that I could not?”
Phoenix snorted. “Sanity, for one thing.”
Drakov’s eyes widened slightly. “You truly think I am insane? Could an insane man have accomplished what I have?”
“It’s been done before,” said Phoenix wryly. “I could name examples, but I don’t think you’d care for the comparisons. On the other hand, you might be flattered.”
Drakov smiled. “You don’t understand. That much, at least, is clear. I suppose that was my mistake. As a leader, I should have motivated my men, imbued them with a sense of purpose. I failed with you. As you can see, I have not failed with these. “He swept his arm out to indicate the guards.
“What’s it all about, Nikolai?’ said Phoenix. “What are you trying to do here?”
“Finish what I began,” said Drakov. “More to the point, what the Timekeepers began and were never able to see through to the end. Before a new order can be established, the old one must be torn down, destroyed completely. That is the first principle of anarchism. As in the karmic cycle, death must come before rebirth. Only in this case the cycle has been interfered with. Mensinger’s warnings went unheeded, and what he feared most has finally come to pass.”
“The alternate timeline,” Phoenix said.
Drakov raised his eyebrows. “You surprise me. I am forever underestimating you. How much do you know?”
“Only that temporal interference has resulted in massive fluctuations in the timestream,” Phoenix said, “bringing about a confluence between two separate timelines. Where do you fit in?”
“I am an integral part of it,” said Drakov. “I may even have helped bring it about. When your treachery caused my submarine base to be raided, I escaped along with Benedetto. We had a contingency plan. We had preset our coordinates to the 27th century, the last time period in which anyone would think to look for us. But fate had a surprise in store for us. Somehow we clocked forward into a different timeline, almost identical to this one, a virtual mirror image, only with some significant discrepancies. We did not realise this at first, which led us to make mistakes that resulted in our being apprehended. Their surprise was as great as ours. Both Benedetto and I were exhaustively debriefed. They wrung us dry to get information about this timeline, which they had been unaware of. What they learned from us explained a great deal about certain phenomena they were experiencing.
“They had a Mensinger as well,” Drakov continued, “one very much like ours. Only they listened to him. They possessed the sanity to stop their Time Wars. But we have forced them to begin again by making war on them.”
“What are you talking about?” said Phoenix. “No one’s made—”
“What do you think happens when someone sets off a warp grenade?” said Drakov, “such as when Lucas Priest exploded one in 19th century Ruritania to break out of Zenda Castle?”
Phoenix frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“A peculiar temporal phenomenon occurs,” said Drakov. “The chronocircuitry in a warp grenade, as I understand it, is designed to clock the surplus energy of the explosion through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge to the Orion Nebula, where it can do no harm. Correct? Eminently practical for military applications, one would think. You can focus the energy of a nuclear explosion with pinpoint precision while the major force of its destructive power is teleported elsewhere. Only such massive expenditures of energy are never totally predictable, especially when coupled with the delicate alignment of chronotransitions.”
“Which means?” said Phoenix.
“It means, my friend, that this latest insane escalation of military weaponry has thrown off the chronophysical alignments of the bridges Einstein-Rosen Generators tap into. The people in the alternate timeline have been the unfortunate victims of this phenomenon. You have been waging nuclear war upon them.”
“My God,” said Phoenix. “That would mean…” His voice trailed off.
“Thousands have been annihilated,” Drakov said. “Hundreds of thousands. And they never knew the reason for the holocaust. They had no idea who was behind it. Until now.”
Chapter 8
They clocked into a large, shadowy hall inside a dark, cavernous building. The atmosphere was dank and musty, with a feeling of great age. Massive stone columns supported a domed ceiling, and torches flickered in stone sconces. At the far end of the hall, atop a giant altar, was a huge obsidian statue of the goddess Kali, arms held out like an arachnid, skulls around her neck, tongue lolling. Their footsteps echoed on the stone floor.
“Where are we?” said Finn.
“In an old, deserted lamasery high above the Khyber Pass,” said the twin Priest. “It used to be the temple of a thugee cult, which accounts for the statue and the grotesque carvings on the columns. It makes for a suitable base of operations. From below it’s virtually invisible. An observer won’t even spot it with field glasses unless he knows what he’s looking for.”
They saw a number of Pathan tribesmen standing guard and a few gray-uniformed soldiers moving about briskly, carrying equipment. They were taken to a small chamber, lit by portable lamps which generated their own power. There was a long table in the center of the room, with about a dozen chairs around it. Priest directed them to sit.
There were a number of soldiers in the room, all standing around the perimeter, watching them. A number of the faces looked unfamiliar, but Delaney spotted one he thought he knew.
“Bryant?” he said.
The officer looked back at him, deadpan.
“Bryant, but not Bryant,” Finn said.
The officer gave him a faint ghost of a smile.
“Martin,” said Andre, seeing another man.
The husky, bearded lieutenant gave her a brief nod.
“It’s amazing,” said Delaney. “A mirror-image universe.”
“Not quite,” said Priest. “But close.” He walked up to Finn and pulled off his turban. “If you have a counterpart, I haven’t met him.” He turned to Andre and yanked off her turban. Her long blonde hair cascaded down.
There was a strange look on his face. “Tell me about the other Lucas Priest,” he said. “What was your relationship to him?”
“We were a team,” she said. “The three of us. Lucas was my friend.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry he’s dead. How did it happen?”
“He died saving a man’s life.”
Priest nodded. “As good a way to go as any, I suppose. I wanted very much to meet him. I’d heard a great deal about you three.”
“From whom?” Delaney said, frowning.
Priest smiled. “From a man named Drakov.”
“Drakov!” said Delaney.
“Nikolai Drakov arrived in our timeline escaping from you. Exactly how he managed to arrive is a complex question which we’ll save for the time being. He was unaware at first that he was not quite where he thought he was. As a result he made several mistakes which led to his arrest. Imagine his surprise, and ours, when we learned the truth. He was put through an exhaustive interrogation, the purpose of which was to learn as much about your timeline as we could. I use the term we generically. I was not personally involved. At least not at that point.
“The discovery of your timeline’s existence explained a great many things for us. It also raised a number of extremely difficult questions. For a number of years we had enjoyed uninterrupted peace. Our history, it seems, p
aralleled yours very closely. We had a Professor Mensinger as well, only he was considerably more successful than his counterpart in your timeline. He managed to prove to the Council of Nations that temporal warfare could interfere with history. Consequently, a ceasefire resolution was passed and temporal warfare was abandoned. The temporal armies were redirected toward space colonization, which I understand you have not pursued as extensively as we have. We found other means of settling our conflicts. Not perfect solutions, admittedly, but that need not concern you.
“Several years ago, by our Plus Time reckoning, we came under attack. A colony transport fleet was almost completely annihilated while en route to its destination with new settlers in coldsleep storage tanks. The few surviving ships could give no indication of why they were attacked, from where, or even by whom. Not long after that, the city of Altaira on the colony world New Queensland was destroyed. Reduced to slag. Again, no indication of who launched the attack nor from where it came. Other, similar attacks followed, apparently without rhyme or reason. Sometimes populated areas were destroyed, sometimes uninhabited moons or planetoids, sometimes the explosions occurred in space. Yet they all had the same things in common. No one could tell who was responsible. No one could tell where the attacks came from. Each attack was a nuclear strike. And we have now learned that each attack came from your timeline, through an artificially created warp in spacetime.”
“Warp grenades,” Delaney said in a low voice. “Sweet Jesus, what have we done?”
“Killed thousands, millions of innocent people,” Priest said. “And, until Nikolai Drakov fell into our hands, we had no idea who was responsible.”
“How could we have known?” said Andre in a shocked voice.
Priest shrugged fatalistically. “Perhaps you couldn’t have. Your moral culpability, on purely ethical grounds, is certainly open to debate, but that’s neither here nor there. Suffice it to say that while it may be understood, in principle, that you didn’t realize what you were doing, a great many people don’t see it that way. If you had known, I have no doubt you would have stopped teleporting nuclear explosions through corridors in spacetime that bridged to our universe. But would that have been enough? What about all the lives that were lost? How could you possibly make reparations for them? Besides, the situation is considerably more complex than that.
“I was in retirement when I was reactivated. I thought I had seen an end of military service, but there was a need for personnel with my qualifications. The Special Operations Group was brought together based on information obtained from Nikolai Drakov. One of my main objectives on this mission was to locate you. Not you specifically, but the temporal adjustment team we were certain would be sent back to this time period when a discontinuity became evident.
“You traced our warp discs somehow,” said Delaney.
“It took a good deal of time,” said Priest, “but that was to be expected. We weren’t sure when you would arrive or where you’d be.”
“And now that you’ve found us?” Andre said.
“First, I need to establish to my satisfaction that you two are the only temporal soldiers in the group. You were the only ones carrying discs, but I need to be sure. This one,” he approached Din, who sat wide-eyed, totally bewildered by it all, “is probably exactly what you say he is, unless he’s one hell of a damned good actor. The others I am equally disposed to believe are native to this time period. Scanning procedures will quickly establish that.”
“And then?” said Finn.
“One of you will return with us for some rather extensive debriefing. The other one will be allowed to return to Plus Time—your own Plus Time, that is—with an offer of terms.”
“What sort of terms?” said Andre.
“It should be obvious that unrestricted warfare between our two timelines would have devastating results for all concerned. It would be impossible to control. Neither you nor we would be able to target our weapons with any reasonable degree of accuracy. There are massive fluctuations in each timestream, resulting in points of confluence between our two timelines. That was how Drakov fell into our hands. The prevailing theory among our scientists is that discontinuities created by temporal actions in your timeline are responsible. The confluence effect may have been brought about by a single, massive disruption, or it could have been cumulative. The possibility was briefly considered that one of the two timelines was created by a timestream split, but fortunately that hypothesis was dismissed when we discovered significant differences in our histories and even in certain of our natural laws. I say fortunately because if that were not the case, we would be faced with certain insurmountable … philosophical questions, for lack of a better way of saying it. However, that still leaves us with other problems.
“We are confronted with the fact that you have committed hostile acts against us—knowingly or unknowingly, that’s not at issue. We are also confronted with the fact that our timelines are intertwining in a completely unpredictable manner, like some cosmic double helix. Our scientists believe there’s a possibility that our two timelines, as a result of interactive temporal inertia, could stabilize by merging into one. The results could be disastrous, on an unimaginable scale.
“Even without that possibility, our Council is still faced with overwhelming pressure. People want retribution for the destruction of the colonies. We don’t have any choice in the matter. If interactive temporal inertia compensates for the instability of our timelines by making them flow together into a single timeline, then the only course of action open to us is to maintain that instability. Perhaps if the instability were magnified, temporal inertia would be overwhelmed and our timelines would be forced apart.”
“Perhaps?” Delaney said. “There’s no way of knowing that! What you’re suggesting could work the way you say, but hell, that’s only theoretical! It could also result in a massive timestream split!”
“That possibility was taken into consideration,” Priest said. “Our scientists think a timestream split could serve to overcome the confluence effect. True, it would create a whole new, possibly more serious problem, but if the split took place in your timeline, it would create no difficulties for us.
“We were not responsible for this situation,” he continued. “We foresaw the dangers and we stopped our Time Wars. You did not, and we have suffered for it, so we’re not terribly concerned about splitting your timeline if that solves our problem. However, that may prove to be difficult. It may take some doing, so we’d like to negotiate a treaty—call it agreeing upon conventions of war—wherein both sides agree to limit the conflict to temporal actions. Otherwise the result would be incalculable loss of life on both sides from advanced weaponry which may, because of the confluence effect, become redirected at the user. The war is already a fait accompli. We merely wish to limit the potential casualties and wage it as logically as possible.”
“Logically?” said Delaney. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”
Priest nodded. “Unfortunately, Lieutenant Delaney, I realize only too well. I don’t like this any better than you do, but I have no choice. We must interfere with your history in order to protect our own. We must increase the instability in your timeline, even to the point of bringing about a timestream split if necessary, in order to maintain our temporal integrity.”
“A war like that would have disastrous consequences for both our timelines,” said Andre. “There has to be another alternative!”
“There is,” said Priest. “We’d like to avoid an all-out temporal war, if possible. The only way to ensure that is with a massive first strike. And that is my other objective on this mission. You are prisoners of war. You will be treated fairly, with the respect due to your rank. But I must warn you that any attempt to escape will result in execution. Lock them up.”
The soldiers from the alternate timeline led them away. Priest watched them go, a strange expression on his face. Captain Bryant came up to stand beside him.
“Well,” he said
laconically,” that certainly was interesting. I thought you handled that very well, considering.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Priest said tensely.”I had to keep telling myself she’s a different person.”
“She’s not, you know,” said Bryant. “Her genetic makeup is the same. She looks the same, she talks the same—”
“Enough!” said Priest. “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to make you face up to it now, before it really starts eating at your guts,” said Bryant.
“She isn’t the same Andre. She’s not my wife.”
“You and I both know that,” Bryant said,” but we also know how you fell apart when your wife died. Lucas, don’t do this to yourself. Let Martin handle the interrogation.”
Priest shook his head. “We’re all going to have to face up to this sooner or later. It’s like making war upon ourselves. I can’t delegate responsibility simply because I don’t have the stomach to do what must be done.”
“It’s not the same thing,” said Bryant. “I wish you’d reconsider.”
“I wish I could,” said Priest.”But I can’t abandon my responsibility. When the time comes, I’ll have to wring her dry. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go get drunk.”
“A fine thing,” said Darkness, manifesting from his tachyon state. “I send you out to gather information and you get yourself jailed.”
Phoenix quickly got his feet inside the cell. “Man, am I glad to see you! But keep your voice down, for Christ’s sake! The guards will hear!”
“Of what concern is that to me? I have far more important matters on my mind. Have you managed to learn anything at all?”
“I’ve learned plenty. Come on, Doc, keep it down, you’ll only—”
